The present invention relates to a method for manufacturing glass and gold slabs for mosaics.
Even nowadays, the method for manufacturing glass and gold slabs for preparing gold mosaics is still a substantially skill-intensive manual process, and owing to its high costs it is performed by master glassmakers to produce mosaic compositions of particular artistic value.
The method consists in forming, by blowing, globes of thin glass which are then split so as to form convex square pieces. These square pieces are then deposited on a flat iron scoop with their concave side facing downward and a gold leaf is applied thereto by means of a wet process.
The scoop is then transferred into a furnace, where the heat flattens the square piece. Molten glass is then poured onto the gold leaf in an amount sufficient to form a considerably thick layer. A slab is thus obtained in which the gold leaf is perfectly embedded.
The tesserae for composing the mosaic are then cut from the slab. The tesserae are applied by interposing a suitable binding agent between the surface to be covered (wall, floor, ceiling) and the thicker layer of glass, so that the exposed face is the one covered by the thin layer of glass.
The conventional method for manufacturing gold mosaic tesserae entails some considerable drawbacks, which consist in the limited size of the slabs that can be obtained, also because it is very difficult to maintain the integrity of the surface of the gold leaf for sizes greater than approximately 10.times.10 cm. Another drawback of the prior art is the fact that the gold leaf, being extremely fragile, can be applied only manually and therefore entails considerable labor costs.